27 September to 3 October 2015, you’re on!
This was a rigging week. Intensive Blenderese and tech talk to follow.
Earlier this week I had a play with scripting. I’ve been working on a replacement mouth rig for Gronky. Instead of using a single armatured mesh for Gronky’s mouth which is subject to annoyances like face stretching, I thought I could find a way around that by having a series of mouths that I can drop in like the clicky mouths they use in stop motion.
And what better way to manage those clicky mouths than a nifty little UI, I thought. Blender UI can’t be that hard, can it?
Turns out the UI side of things isn’t super-hard. What’s hard is knowing how to factor the damn thing so it’ll work as a linked asset and keep up with Blender’s infamous dependency graph. After a couple of late nights proofing concepts which were educational but not suitable for production, I’m leaning towards a system which is still modular but uses the UI only as “sugar” – the idea is that I can import whatever mouth mini-rig I need and parent it to a couple of bones on the main body armature. I can make the mini-rig visible/invisible as I need to by animating the visibility. I might be able to make that on/off process easier with a panel but.. yeah. Still working out the particulars. 🙂
And I don’t even know if replacement mouths are ultimately necessary because I haven’t finished the story art yet. Nice to know how to get that freedom, sure, but better to know whether I need it. In search of answers, I’ve been pulling other rigs apart to look at how they do it and watching movies to try to figure out how they do it. Despicable Me 2 has some great mouth rigging in it – the mouths travel all over the face pretty much, and there’s no obvious texture stretch or other nasty artefacts. Also no special features about the technical process on the BluRay. Bastards.
Healthwise, my shoulder pain is clearing up and I’ve started getting some exercise in to prepare myself for carrying luggage and slogging around Amsterdam in a couple of weeks’ time either side of Blender Conference 2015. Yeee!
That’s it for this week.
